Today we’re here to trigger ourselves and all of you listening, because we have to talk about the disgusting operation that is Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment. 

Listen here:

In this episode we’ll cover some backstory, key points, our own experience, some stories that you shared with us on Instagram, as well as the current news happening at the judicial level right now. 

Chapter 1: What is Ticketmaster?

• TM is an American ticket sales and distribution company based in Beverly Hills, California with operations in many countries around the world.  (Wikipedia)
• In 2010, TM merged with Live Nation under the name Live Nation Entertainment. (Wikipedia)
• Michael Rapino – the Chief Executive Officer of Live Nation – is a Canadian-American business executive and the Chief Executive Officer and President of Live Nation Entertainment, Inc, which was formed in 2010 following the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. (Wikipedia)

Chapter 2: What’s the issue with Ticketmaster?

There are 3 main issues we as music fans face with Ticketmaster: 

• Monopoly 
• Pricing + Fees
• Scalping

Let’s start with the Monopoly conversation: 

• Monopoly: a market with the “absence of competition”, creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with a decrease in social surplus. (Wikipedia)
  • Does Ticketmaster have any competition?
    • AXS is an American ticket outlet for entertainment events founded in 2011 and owned by AEG (the world’s second largest entertainment promoter, behind Live Nation Entertainment).
    • Ticketmaster.com’s top 5 competitors (based on site visits in Feb 2023) are:
      • Ticketmaster has 113.6m monthly visits
      • Stubhub has 19.8m monthly visits
      • Live Nation has 19.5m monthly visits
      • Vivid Seats has 17.6m monthly visits
      • Songkick.com has 17.1m monthly visits
      • Seat Geek has 14.4m monthly visits
      • axs.com has 16.0m monthly visits
  • Why are things this way? (The Hustle)
    • Live Nation owns ~400 venues worldwide and holds tens of thousands of shows every year as a promoter. 
    • Industry experts say ~70%-80% of major US venues have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. 
    • In 2019, the Justice Department found Live Nation had exerted pressure on venues to sign with Ticketmaster or risk not receiving Live Nation shows, violating a consent decree signed when the companies’ merger was approved.
    • While AEG worked as Swift’s promoter, for instance, AEG claimed it could not use its AXS ticketing platform because the vast majority of NFL stadiums contracted with Ticketmaster.
• Pricing/Fees: the estimate for what concert goers are paying in fees is estimated to be 30% of the ticket’s face value. Ticketmaster has: service fee, facility fee, and a processing fee. 
  • Service fee: per the LA Times, “the ‘service fee’ is intentionally kept separate from the list price for two reasons: to make the base price of a ticket appear more affordable, and to create the impression that only Ticketmaster pockets that fee.”
  • Dynamic pricing: “Official platinum” 
  • Per Ticketmaster, the system is touted to give artists a higher share of the revenues that would otherwise be coming through resale ticket sales.
  • They never say what the original cost of the seats are so we never know if we are getting a good deal with dynamic pricing (the answer is we always get screwed). 
  • By not putting all the tickets on sale at the same time, they are creating their own higher demand for the tickets. 
  • Event organizer = Live Nation = Ticketmaster. 

• Scalping/Reselling
  • Bots & business
  • “Verified fan” measure is not enough 
  • Per a study done in 2018 (CBC news and Toronto Star), Ticketmaster works WITH scalpers. How?
    • They don’t put all tickets for sale at the beginning
    • Hike prices mid-sale. 
    • Collect fees twice on tickets scalped on their site. 
    • Per recorded conversations that Billboard uncovered in 2019, Ticketmaster has worked with resell websites to sell “resold” tickets that were actually never put on sale to begin with.

Chapter 3: What’s the status on Ticketmaster today? Can anyone hold them accountable?

• Because of social media, artists are acutely aware of the fans’ feelings. These artists are all currently in the Ticketmaster conversation:
  • Taylor Swift – botched verified fan sale, running out of tickets, bots & resellers galore
  • Drake – they sold 1 concert night at 2-3x the price, and then released a second night for cheaper prices
  • Beyonce – fans are traveling to see her in Europe, because the entire trip cost is still less than paying to see her stateside. 
  • The Cure – they have extremely affordable ticket prices as low as $20, and the fees come out to $27. 
• The K-Pop side:
  • No one has cared about K-Pop fans getting screwed for years. (not even the artists or their companies)
• The legal update:
  • Ticketmaster is currently expecting lawsuits from over 300 fans of Taylor for “fraud, misrepresentation, and antitrust violations.”
  • A Canadian law firm has filed a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster for allegedly inflating ticket prices for an upcoming Drake concert. 
  • Biden introduced the Junk Fee Prevention Act and called on Congress to take action  by prohibiting excess fees, requiring fees to be disclosed in the face value of the ticket, and mandating disclosure of any ticket holdbacks that would lower available supply for consumers.

Is anything ACTUALLY going to change? We don’t know. But you can be angry with us and watch along as we fume: